The Emptied Sea
Who empties the ocean, how, and why a world that once banned the walls of death now allows a larger system in their place.
This is a three-part investigation into industrial overfishing on the high seas — what is being done, who is doing it, and why a planet that once moved to ban the walls of death has built a larger system that does worse work in their place. The argument is documented. The actors are named. The sources are listed. Beneath the three essays sits The Ledger — the named accountability roll, a standing companion to the series that lays the entire system out by function, beside its sources.
The three parts publish across consecutive editions of The Waypoint, in June 2026. The Ledger is live from launch and updated as the world updates.
In December 1991, the United Nations did something it almost never does to a profitable global industry: it told it to stop. The world banned the driftnets. A bigger, quieter system has taken their place — five million hooks set every day on a web that touches half the ocean, with no equivalent moratorium in sight. Part I documents the machinery: who fishes, under whose flag, where the catch goes, and why the loophole that closed in one country still runs in dozens of others.
Read Part I →Where Part I described the machinery of the industrial high-seas fishing system, Part II turns to its memory. To what the witnesses saw and what we are in danger of forgetting. To the shifting baseline by which each generation accepts the depleted ocean of its own time as natural. And to the Indian Ocean, the Seychelles-flagged purse-seine fleet, and a Kenyan fisherman in Vanga who said: “Tuna is not for everyone.”
The closing argument. On the $35 billion a year in public subsidies that prop up an industry the market would not pay for. On horizon blindness — the spatial counterpart to the shifting baseline, and the diagnosis at the heart of the series — and how it allows an ocean to be emptied in plain sight. On five concrete policy asks, the WTO termination clause, and the Newfoundland ballroom in the summer of 1992 where a moratorium expected to last two years lasted thirty-two.
A sourced, updated record of the named actors across the global high-seas fishing system, organised by function: subsidisers, distant-water nations, named operators, flags of convenience, coastal states under duress, importing markets, regulators, the independent IUU Fishing Risk Index, and enforcement on record. Almost everything recorded there is entirely legal — which is precisely the point.
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